December 1 2009

I'm not paranoid, there has always been a basis for the way I view the competitive market...and every so often, written, supporting documentation comes along:

Its time for a decision on iShellBrowser.

This is a tough decision. ...It is hard to know how much actual market benefit iShellBrowser integration would bring. I believe Chicago will be very successful either way. Unfortunately I don't think the integration will have a marked effect in terms of Capone competing with cc:Mail, so that battle will have to be won on other grounds. This is not to say that there was anything wrong with the extensions - on the contrary they are a very nice piece of work.

On the other hand, we are in a real struggle vs. Notes and the Office/REN team needs to move as quickly as they can to deliver really rich, unified views of information and to provide and exploit storage unification as systems makes that possible, and we need as clear as path as possible to allow them to do that. The Ren team has a lot of challenges and compatibility would be an extra effort for them of at least 5 men years. If we felt we could expand this team easily to help Office, beat Notes, be a source of future shell technology and be compatible then I would say the extensions are ok. However the Ren team will find it tough to deliver on all of these even without compatibility.

I have decided that we should not publish these extensions. We should wait until we have a way to do a high level of integration that will be harder for the likes of Notes, Wordperfect to achieve, and which will give Office a real advantage.

OK, this is a fifteen-year old memo and the iShellBrowser wasn't exactly the key to whether Microsoft triumphed or lost in the messaging and collaboration space. But the decision on whether a functional interface that could be part of Windows was published and exposed or not published was one that went all the way up to Gates, and he decided in part based on whether it would advantage Microsoft in beating Notes. Mind you, at the time, 1994, Microsoft didn't even have anything in market competing with Notes.